Wedding Vendor Tips for Hiring & Motivating Interns

This week’s blog topic came to me because I’ve just been so incredibly busy this year – especially now that the holidays are here. As small business owners, we constantly feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. We’re working harder than ever.
So, it’s important to take a step back every once in a while to energize and prioritize our lives. In doing so, focus more on the areas of your business that will drive the most benefits. It is also important to make sure that you dedicate a small amount of time each day to yourself. And finally, consider hiring interns to delegate your more tactical tasks, so that you can be more strategic and innovative.

Hiring interns can be an excellent low-cost (and sometimes free) alternative to doing everything on your own. It’s also a great way to pump new energy into your wedding services.

Here are some tips for finding and attracting interns:
1. Create an engaging internship position. You will attract strong talent if you create a position in which there is significant opportunity to learn. The most engaging internship experiences are NOT the ones that require interns to make copies.
2. Consider having a contest to attract talent. You can challenge prospective interns to come up with the most original wedding theme or inspiration board. There are a lot of fun challenges that you can come up with to gauge a prospective intern’s passion for weddings as well as their ability to think outside of the box.
3. Contact your local university or college. Send their career placement center a professionally written description of your business as well as the internship position/s.
4. Leverage social networks and word-of-mouth. If you are having a contest, you can tweet about it or post it on various wedding forums.

Here are just of a few of the things that you should consider when evaluating a prospective intern:
1. Are you confident that this new hire will enable you to achieve the same level of service?
2. Does this new hire have a clear picture of your business and the position?
3. Can you be comfortable giving up some control to this new hire?
4. Does this new hire really want this job? Do they want to have a future in the wedding industry? (If this is true, they will likely be motivated and eager to learn.)

After you have hired your intern/s, be sure to spend time with them. Develop your interns and make sure that this is a positive learning experience for them. If you invest your time and energy in their growth, you and your business will certainly reap the rewards.

Do you have any advice to share about attracting, hiring and leading interns?

About This Blog: Christine Dyer has an MBA in marketing and shares over ten years of marketing expertise with the wedding community. In this weekly blog called Supercharge Your Wedding Business, you'll find advice on an array of wedding business topics such as how to market to brides, social networking, wedding PR, wedding sales, vendor networking, branding, pricing and much more. .Please pass this news along to your own professional wedding network. To receive this advice in your email inbox each week, Sign Up for a Free BridalTweet Membership.